A Comparative Analysis Between English Suffix "-er" And Chinese Suffix "-者"

Taking Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Modern Chinese Dictionary as corpora, we have looked up all the words in the form of "R (Root)-er" in English dictionary and all the words in the form of "R-者" in Chinese dictionary, and got 1309 English words and 22 Chinese words respectively. On the basis of these words, this thesis makes a comparative analysis on the characters, grammatical functions, semantic functions, semantic scopes of the two suffixes "-er" and "-者", as well as collocational rules according to which these two suffixes collocate with the root "R".Based on the rule "whether 'R-er' is separable, whether the semantic meaning of 'R' is distinct, and whether 'R' itself is a word", "R-er" can be classified into three groups. The words belonging to the first two groups are derivational words, of which "-er" is suffix. The words in third group are not derivational words any more than their "-er" is a suffix, since their "R-er" is neither separable, nor does their "R" form a word, nor is the semantic meaning of "R" distinct, such as meter and anger. There is another group of "R-er" words, although their "-er" is suffix, they are defined as compound words instead of derivational words according to the syntagmatic relation within a word, such as best-seller, etc. In modern Chinese, scholars hold different opinions towards the definition of "-者", and their understandings fall into two groups: an auxiliary and a suffix. This thesis agrees that only the one which attaches to a noun, a verb or an adjective is a suffix, and on the contrary the one which appears after a localizer or a numeral is an auxiliary. The searching result that there isn't even single...